Frank Lampard can't play every game this season says Jose Mourinho

Mourinho doesn't think that at the age of 35, Lampard should be playing every match

The Special One no longer believes Lamps is up to slogging his way through 60 games a year like he used to now he is 35.

Lampard hardly missed a match during Mourinho’s first spell in charge and has only just signed a new contract at Chelsea.

But Mourinho insists his master plan to manage the England midfielder’s minutes will actually extend his career. The Blues boss said: “Before, we didn’t analyse. Before it was, ‘Every match, he plays’.

“Sometimes I wanted to give him a rest in a Carling Cup match and he said, ‘If you give me a rest the next match I will not be the same, because I have to play every three days’. At this moment, though, we have just to analyse the fixtures, to analyse the matches, to analyse the week we have and make some choices.

“While I believe he is the same player, the difference is at 35 he needs time to recover from match to match. It is not the same for a man of 25 as a man of 35. That’s the only point.

“He can’t play 60 matches like he did before, but the quality of the player and what he represents for the way I like to play football is exactly the same. The role doesn’t have to change. What has to change is the way we analyse competition.”

The statistics back up Mourinho’s argument. In three full seasons under him, Lampard averaged 67 games a season for club and country. But in the last three seasons, he has played on average fewer than 50, with his role increasingly under scrutiny as he was left on the bench by Andre Villas-Boas and Rafa Benitez.

Mourinho claims he has explained the situation to Lampard, who accepts it and understands that Claude Makelele was able to extend his career by doing the same thing.

Lampard is currently sitting out on Chelsea's pre-season tour with an Achilles injury

Mourinho said: “Frank’s intelligent, he’s open and he has a very good relationship with me.

“He knows that I’m very experienced and he knows what I did, for example, with Makelele in the last two years he played.

“He knows I know how to do it with players of his age, because we have to be clever. Performance is how good you are, not your birth certificate.”

Lampard has already been forced to sit out the opening two games of Chelsea’s Far East tour and is also likely to be left out of tomorrow’s clash with the BNI Indonesia All-Stars in Jakarta as he nurses a sore Achilles.

That has given other midfielders like Ramires a chance to establish themselves – and the Brazilian hopes to make the most of it.

He said: “I need a trainer who stays for a while and is allowed to continue with his work rather than being asked to leave before he can establish his working patterns.

“Performance is how good you are, not your birth certificate”

Jose Mourinho

“But I am excited to be playing for Mourinho and I hope that he stays for a long time.

“In the last two years, we lost too many games that we should have won. That hurt us.

“It is very important to keep Mourinho’s record of never losing a home game in the league going.

“Hopefully we can keep that up as players because it could make all the difference. Hopefully we can win the league. Then, title after title, Chelsea will keep the trophy."